Dave Singer wrote:
> At 17:46 +0200 7/07/08, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>> An alternative might be to add a header "look, I guessed it" when
>>> Apache adds a 'guessed' text/plain as the content-type, and say that
>>> browsers might take text/plain+IGuessed as something to sniff. This
>>> is like the proposed Microsoft header but the other way up...
>>
>> I agree that's nicer in theory. But how do we get all the existing
>> installations to change their DefaultType?
>
> Well, someone has already said that the IE upgrade rate is less than
> 50%. There are a lot more clients (browsers) than servers out there,
> and system admins tend to be better at upgrading than users (because
> they get security fixes along with bug fixes).
http://philip.html5.org/data/server-versions.txt shows the versions from
Server headers seen when downloading ~130K links from dmoz.org, about
four months ago.
Looking at major versions of Apache:
Apache/1.3: 33447
Apache/2.0: 16026
Apache/2.2: 8733
Looking at minor versions of 1.3:
Apache/1.3.(0..9): 244
Apache/1.3.(10..19): 532
Apache/1.3.(20..29): 6175
Apache/1.3.(30..39): 24932
Apache/1.3.(40..49): 1553
Half of the Apache/1.3 servers are 1.3.34 (released October 2005) or older.
Looking at ISS, the most significant numbers are:
Microsoft-IIS/4.0: 327
Microsoft-IIS/5.0: 6990
Microsoft-IIS/6.0: 22038
Microsoft-IIS/7.0: 30
IIS/6.0 seems to have been released in 2003; about a quarter of the IIS
servers are older than that.
In comparison, IE7 was released in October 2006, and something like a
third to two-thirds of IE users still use IE6. Firefox 2 was released in
March 2006, and something like 15% still use FF 1.5.
So, it doesn't seem true that web servers are upgraded much faster than
web browsers.
--
Philip Taylor
pjt47@cam.ac.uk